Page 175 of Controlled Burn
Brooks
He didn’t need to be at the station to watch it burn.
Less than twelve hours after HR pulled him out of the watch office, Brooks sat in a grimy Warwick Avenue motel, hunched over a warped desk, fingers poised above the keyboard. The lamp buzzed overhead, cheap fluorescent light painting the walls in jaundiced streaks. The burner laptop hummed, running hot from the render.
The folder was ready. Final cut. LabeledCLEANSE.
Inside: stolen security footage, helmet cam captures, locker room stills, the hallway feed from that night on the bay floor. Every image scrubbed, clipped, distorted for impact. No voices. Just shadow and skin and shame.
He zipped the file. Uploaded it to three cloud backups. Encrypted. Watermarked with a URL that auto-triggered social shares through a buried Reddit forum. Anonymous tip email queued to every local news outlet, linked directly to the compilation.
The news wouldn’t break it first.
The internet would.
Brooks hit upload.
“Controlled Burn: The Scandal No One Saw Coming.”
He sat back. Smiled. Peeled the label off a gas station sandwich and ate it cold while the internet burned.
Talia
She was mid-shift in the kitchen, slicing into a peach, the sticky juice running down her fingers. For one fragile second, it felt almost normal—quiet, routine, safe.
Then Ryan walked in. Phone in hand. Face pale.
“Cross,” he said hoarsely. “You need to see this.”
She wiped her hands on a paper towel, brows pulling. The kitchen TV was already on—usually tuned to sports or weather. But now?
Now it was chaos.
Her face.
On the screen.
CCTV footage blurred at the edges, but not enough. Her in the bunkroom. Her and Maddox on the bay floor. The headline screamed in red:LEAKED FOOTAGE REVEALS SHOCKING FIREHOUSE AFFAIR.
The peach slipped from her fingers and hit the tile with a wet thud.
Someone behind her whispered,“Is that… real?”
Her hands trembled as she backed out of the room, bile rising in her throat.
She didn’t watch the video. Didn’t need to. The shame hit first. Then the rage. Then the chilling realization—
She wasn’t the fire anymore.
She was the fuel.
Maddox
His phone didn’t ring. It detonated.
Six missed calls from Stark. Four from Rachel. A dozen texts from numbers he didn’t recognize.
He ignored them all.
